The market, Salonica

The market, Salonica

Friday, 23 May 2014

Bi guy, 62, very open-minded dog

I saw this dating ad on
TV and I thought, how nice, a fellow creature who won’t look down on you. Pets can be picky, but one dog at least won’t
snarl. Then I was disappointed. On the next line, the word lover was waiting to pounce. The bi guy, 62, was an open-minded dog lover.

It
was meant to be reassuring. You can trust
someone who keeps a pet. Daters, like
everybody else, are looking for people they can trust. They often specify genuine. I’ve even seen Status no problem, just be genuine. It doesn’t matter if your intended mate
is married, as long as you can trust them.
But however genuine another man’s wife turns out to be with you, she is
not being very genuine with him.

Lover
and love are two words that don’t often
appear on dating sites, unless they relate to a pet. You don’t want to put people off, especially
if you’re looking for love. Of course, it’s
usually more to do with fun. It’s also pretty
mercenary. I like Must have own house and car.
It does make physical meetings easier, so it’s partly practical, but whoever
posts this could sound like a money-grubber.
To tell the truth, on-line daters count pennies as much as penises. They don’t write own house and car. They put ohac instead.And gen, not genuine. No
tws = don’t reply if you don’t want
sex. They abbreviate to save the
credits on their account. Think about
it, though. If you have your ohac
and want to impress an f, m,cd, xd,
tv, tg or ts, too many abbreviations might just look stingy.

There
must be people out there who are looking for love. OK, it was just a thought. But there are
people, apparently, who believe in ‘forever.’
What else can ltr mbm
mean? I saw this the other day. Usually, the ad will run: text chat mbm (maybe more). That’s where the ohac come in. But what more
is there after an ltr (long-term
relationship)? Marriage? Exchanging smutty videos till we die? One day, hopefully quite soon, I will stop
having thoughts.

Before
I leave you – no, I’m not dumping you today, or dying – a final word on pets.There are people who let their dog, or
hamster, watch them make love.Watch, not join in.Perhaps
some people insist.Sit!I expect a dog would show more
interest than a hamster. A pet could also help if things went wrong.I read in the news that a couple got stuck
during sex.

About Me

Spaid once slept in a
cemetery in Greece (it seemed like the safest place to spend the night outside). He was
forced off a bus in India by window-smashing rioters. He’s been robbed, and
mistaken for a thief, a priest, a concert pianist, Woody and Tony Blair. He was
examined by a dentist called Dr Fang. The rest isn't silence...

BBC Radio broadcast a
separate, humorous story set in South India. Like this story, tireless: reflects his
experiences in different countries and jobs.

An
Australian, he has travelled in over thirty countries, working as a language tutor
in Greece, Italy and Taiwan, as well as a teacher in India, Australia and the
UK, where he now lives with his wife.

From the author...

tireless: celebrates the creative
urge while satirizing the people who create.
I wanted to write a book that would keep attention on any page you
turned to, so the person who looked over your shoulder on the train to see what
you were reading would only look away when their station had come.

Harassed? Unloved?
Just watching life go by? Take
this hilarious ride through the narrator’s painful
world and find others who are even worse off than you. Next door you’ll meet
Jim and his outrageous
stories, the unattainable Olga, their dysfunctional children – as well as the
appalling Rat and his companion, Roquefort, who’ll work their way into your
life as they do with everybody else. In
thissatireon human behaviour,
they’re not fair, not fair at all.

The narrator, an
unemployed teacher and aspiring writer, lives in London.When Jim and Olga move in next door, his
imagination is fired by the unhappy wife’s nude sunbathing and the pompous
husband’s breathtaking tall stories.He
recalls his comic victories in the classroom, while fantasizing that Britain’s
south-east has broken off from the mainland.He remembers his own schooldays and considers the impact of young Miss
Bugler.These anecdotes, like Jim’s
stories, highlight the casual cruelties and misunderstandings in human
behaviour and the evasive nature of fulfilment.A turning point is Jim’s recollection of a night in India when he
hallucinated, suffering the taunts of the giant Rat and his close friend,
Roquefort, a miniature cat.Humiliated
by publishers’ rejections, by the rudeness of Jim’s daughter, Daisy, and even
by his barber, the narrator transfers his sense of failure to Rat, who enters
the narrative in a series of disturbing, yet uproarious adventures which merge
illusion with the real world.The
narrator removes the barber’s head, takes revenge on Daisy when she develops an
infatuation for him, and finally publishes something,
in contrast to a now unlucky Rat, who is arrested, almost has a nervous
breakdown, is refused restaurant service, anddisappoints
as an undergraduate at Oxford, where the noisy love-making of Bill and Penny
emphasises his loneliness.

‘A colon comes in handy
here, before examples: two dots on top of one another, like the cowboys who
copulate on Brokeback Mountain, on a slope so far away you need binoculars to
see them properly.’ ... from the chapter RAT
ARRESTED! in tireless: